Sketch took long time to go from sheet of paper to 'Sheets'

Thursday

Jan 24, 2013 at 12:01 AMJan 24, 2013 at 1:29 PM

The Shadowbox Live comedy sketch "Damsels & Dates" required months of work to become good enough to perform. After rounds of conversations and critiques, rewrites and rehearsals, the sketch has become one of the biggest laugh-generators in Between the Sheets, which continues through March 9 at 503 S. Front St.

Michael Grossberg, For The Columbus Dispatch

The Shadowbox Live comedy sketch "Damsels & Dates" required months of work to become good enough to perform.

After rounds of conversations and critiques, rewrites and rehearsals, the sketch has become one of the biggest laugh-generators in Between the Sheets, which continues through March 9 at 503 S. Front St.

"It started as a what-if thing. . . . It's always surprising to me when something I wrote takes off," said Danny Gallagher, a freelance contributor to the Shadowbox writing team. Gallagher lives in Frisco, Texas, a Dallas suburb.

In October, Gallagher suggested a sketch about a new fantasy-adventure game about dating.

"It was a very loose concept," said Jimmy Mak, head writer of the eight-member team SCRAWL (Shadowbox Creative Random Arts Writing League).

"It was a fun idea," Mak said. "The main issue is that it didn't have any closure."

Gradually, the sketch evolved into the ninth episode in Shadowbox's "spazoids" series, about three nerdy teenagers who play fantasy games in their rec rooms. In the new sketch, the guys play a game about a heroic feat: dating."As we were preparing this sketch, we began to realize how complex and challenging it would be because we're playing nerds pretending to be popular kids at the high school - and now suddenly are guys who could get dates," Mak said.

Mak plays Kirby, the dungeon master who guides his buddies (David Whitehouse as Albert and J.T. Walker III as Tom) through the unfamiliar rules and choose-your-own adventures of the game.

"I take the guys on the adventure at the school and concoct the whole story they have to follow," Mak said. "The challenge for me was that I've never played Dungeons and Dragons in my life."

In the first draft, completed by early November, the sketch was so confusing that it didn't make sense.

By then, Mak said, all the other sketches had a green light for Between the Sheets, but "Damsels & Dates" remained in limbo.

After two more drafts by freelance contributor Don Frye, Mak wrote a fourth to simplify the scenario.

"Earlier drafts were too heavy on the fantasy games," he said. "We felt what people would connect with more was the guy trying to get the girl."

Shadowbox president Stev Guyer, whose initial reaction had been mixed, warmed to the sketch.

"I was afraid it would be too much of an inside joke as a Dungeons and Dragons takeover," Guyer said.

"I told them the jokes needed to be funny in and of themselves, . . . so they developed jokes based on the characters and on skateboarders and football players rather than orcs and dwarfs."

Guyer still couldn't give the sketch full approval when he directed it for the first time in a Dec. 5 rehearsal.

"I thought we still had a lot of work to do," he said.

Through December, everyone worked to improve it, adding physical humor and character interactions.

"As with most of our sketches, we had to do a thousand tiny tweaks - a word here, a phrase there, an inflection, a moment of timing - to clarify the story and increase the effectiveness of the laughs," Guyer said.

When Tom dreams of being an athlete, Walker had to master a new wrinkle with his familiar character.

"Some of our sketches are about the jokes themselves," Walker said, "but this sketch is the kind where the audience needs to go along the journey with the characters."

After playing "awkward" Albert seven times, Whitehouse was ready to reprise his role of an 11-year-old who, in the sketch, dreams of being a cool skateboarder.

"The challenge is remembering what it was like to be that boy at that turning point before adolescence," he said, "where hanging out with your friends playing games is starting to not sound as interesting as meeting a girl."

Whitehouse worked hard with the other actors to hone the "extremes" they explored in rehearsals.

"We had to find the middle ground," he said.

"At one point, I pushed Albert to be so socially awkward that he almost couldn't cope with any relationships outside his friends," he said. "But that added a layer: I found that loyalty to his buddies."

Tuesday Caserta, 53, loved the sketch on opening night.

"It reminded me of high school and the kids I knew back in the day," the Shadowbox regular said.

"Damsels & Dates," she said, ranks among her favorite sketches of the past year.

"Everyone can relate to the spazoids from the perspective of childhood," she said. "It's good old slapstick comedy."